Chains of Redemption

by Selina Rosen

  Levits nodded. "I hope you're right. Be careful!" he yelled at her departing back, though he knew it wasn't very likely. Still, when your girlfriend was a GSH with a legendary talent for battle, you didn't really worry too much about her. Mostly you just felt bad for her opponents.

  Unless they were slimy tentacled guys, and then you just didn't care.

  The children stayed on board as RJ led every other Abornie on the ship out into the jungle to face their mortal enemy. They were afraid, but they were also fed up. They were tired of losing and tired of running. They had been kept down because they'd had no way to fight their enemy, and now they did. Most of them were excited, ready to have it over. On this day, maybe only on this day, they became one people. All thoughts of self were for a split second put behind them. RJ had been half afraid that when it came down to the wire they'd run into the jungle to hide and leave her and her crew to face the Ocupod army on their own. But today they were fighting for the freedom of their race, for the chance of a better life. They believed they were going to win. They believed their new "friends" were going to lead them to a new age, an age of comfort and security. RJ only hoped they didn't lead them into a time of overpopulation, pollution and constant war.

  RJ called her troops to battle stations as the Ocupods fired their first barrage of plasma blasts on the ship. Most of the blasts fell short, and the others bounced off the ship's defense shield. She and Poley ran into the fray as Topaz took his troop to arm the traps that had been mostly designed by him. Of course his first trap didn't have to be armed at all, as became evident when the first row of Ocupods fell into the limb-covered pit.

  As RJ had expected, the machines in the front were in the worst shape, so half of the ones that fell in the pit broke—sometimes immediately killing the slimy alien inside. As the other half tried to climb out, the first line of Abornie fired their lasers at the glass domes of their tentacled oppressors, and as they cracked, a second wave of Abornie ran in with wooden clubs and smashed the domes.

  With their front line basically destroyed and making an obstacle between the ship and the rest of their troop, the Ocupods slowed, seeming to take a collective minute to think. While they were doing this Topaz unleashed his second trap. He gave the order, and the Abornie cut through the ropes holding back the mountains of logs on both the left and right sides of the Ocupods.

  The logs rolled from their devices, bowling an entire row of the Ocupods down and crushing about a third of them. Most of the machines in the front lines were in worse repair than even she had calculated; many were barely operational. The Abornie pressed forward and once again attacked the fallen Ocupods. RJ and Poley ran into the fray, RJ taking the left flank while Poley took the right. They targeted healthy looking machines, ran beneath them and shot out their hydraulic systems. The machines then lurched around hampering the movements of the fully operational units behind them.

  All the while RJ could hear and see the ship's laser and plasma cannons picking off the Ocupods on the back line. Beside her one of the creatures stuck a tentacle all the way through the chest of an Abornie. The Ocupod fired at her and she rolled away from the blast and came up underneath him where she then fired on his hydraulic system. As he was lurching around, he hit RJ with the dead Abornie still stuck on his tentacle and sent her flying through the air. She landed on top of another Ocupod and hung on. She targeted the glass dome with her laser until it cracked and then smacked the glass. As the machine started to lurch in the creature's death spasms she jumped from the top of it to the top of another and did the same thing. She continued to do this till none of them were close enough to jump onto, and then she jumped to the ground and continued her assault from below, again targeting the hydraulic systems.

  By dusk only a dozen of the creatures were still standing, and they were beating a hasty retreat.

  "Levits, hold fire," she ordered and the cannons stopped. "Finish these off," RJ ordered the exhausted Abornie, and pointing at the still lurching Ocupods. "Poley, you with me."

  He nodded and ran after her. "RJ . . . why are we chasing them? Why not let Levits finish them off?"

  "Because they have a communal intelligence," she answered. "Come on . . . we have to beat them to the water."

  "Water . . . RJ, I can't go in the water," Poley reminded.

  "You won't have to. We have to stop them getting back in." She increased her speed.

  "RJ . . . I can't keep up," Poley said.

  "It's all right, Poley you can take the rear."

  He wasn't sure he knew what that meant, but his sister was gone, so he just moved towards the ocean as fast as he could and hoped she was telling him the truth about her plan not including him going into the water.

  RJ pulled out all the stops. It had been a long time since she'd run as fast or jumped as high as she could. It felt good to be pushing herself to the max. She easily got around the Ocupods without them being the wiser and moved between them and the ocean. When they saw her they turned to retreat into the jungle, but Poley was blocking their way. One of them fired upon her, and she once again ran under them, easily knocking out their hydraulic systems, and Poley did the same. In minutes all twelve units were lurching around on the beach.

  "Get back and wait," RJ ordered Poley, and he joined her some fifty feet away from where the Ocupods struggled. Two of them actually managed to get into the water. RJ watched as the domes opened and the Ocupods swam away. She smiled, and waited for the others to lie still on the beach. "You wait here. I'll call if I need you."

  Poley nodded.

  RJ walked to the beach. One by one she dragged the Ocupods into the water. When the last of them had escaped into the ocean she pulled the machines from the water. Once they were out of the water Poley helped her drag them above the high tide line.

  "Why?" Poley asked, as they finished dragging the last one to a safe distance from the water's edge. "I have calculated over and over, and can think of no reason to let those creatures live."

  "They have a communal intelligence," RJ explained.

  "I fail to see the significance of that."

  "By destroying their machines but saving them we showed compassion. That it's not them we hate, but their power over us, i.e. their transport machines. It tells them that we won't come after them in their world. That we are willing to share the planet with them. Them in their place and us in ours.

  "But . . . How does that serve our cause?"

  RJ laughed and patted his back. "Sometimes it's nice just not to be perceived as an asshole."

  "What are you going to do now, RJ?" Poley asked as they walked along the path of destruction the Ocupods had made through the jungle when they had embarked on this, their last campaign.

  RJ looked at the damage around them and thought about all the Ocupod debris around the ship. "Well, the first thing we have to do is clean up the mess."

  "You know what I mean, RJ," Poley said. "You were built for battle. With nothing to fight, what will you do? I was built to serve Stewart, and after that I was programmed to serve you, and when you were in cryogenic sleep—even though I was still fulfilling my purpose—I felt incomplete. What are you going to do?"

  "You found a hobby, perhaps I, too, will find a hobby."

  "I don't think you will find one that will allow you to fulfill your full function."

  Chapter Thirteen

  "Please stop it," Gerald begged, grabbing both of Jessica's arms. She slung him aside like a toy and kept slamming on the keyboard, pulling up one file after another, reading it and then moving on.

  "No! No! It's got to be here. It's got to be here somewhere."

  Gerald picked himself up off the floor and dusted himself off. She hadn't hurt him and she certainly could have. He wasn't mad at her, he was worried. She was completely and totally obsessed. Crazier than he'd ever seen her, and he'd seen her plenty crazy. "RJ . . . it's been three weeks. You've done nothing day or night but pore over these files. You haven't slept, you've hardly eaten. This is
insane"

  "What's insane is thinking that the bastard found the key to eternal life and that he then deleted it. That he would destroy it. No, it's here. Somewhere in all this idiotic prattling on and on about nothingness and . . . Oh, my gods!" She quickly flipped back and reread the page of text she had just so quickly dismissed.

  "Did you find it?" Gerald asked, half afraid of the answer.

  "No . . . But something very interesting. The brilliant but completely insane madman who built all of this and found the formula for eternal life was Stewart's father. That would make him my paternal grandfather." She was thoughtful for a moment. "I wonder if she knows, or knew, depending completely on her living or dead status."

  "If who knew what?" Gerald asked, thinking that with the knowledge she'd just imparted to him, that it must be true what they said about insanity being hereditary.

  "Her. You know. Me," Jessica said.

  Gerald just shook his head, thinking at this point it was better to say nothing at all. She had taken Diana's death hard. For the first month she had stayed close to Mickey and Dax. She seemed to be handling it pretty well, mostly just helping them to cope. Then, just as it was obvious that Mickey and Dax were learning to live with their loss, RJ had gone completely and totally insane. Again.

  One night she'd sat up bolt straight in bed, and announced she had the answer.

  After this revelation all plans to infiltrate the Reliance had been placed on hold while she tore the old prison apart, finding anything that remotely resembled a crystal or an ancient disk. She then sat down to engage in the daunting—even for RJ—task of going through each and every file in the supercomputer's massive memory bank looking for what was, in essence, the formula for immortality.

  Gerald didn't believe that such a thing existed. It was well known that Topaz had been insane. There was no formula at all. He had probably been a GSH, just like RJ was.

  Gerald watched as she devoured one screen of text after another in rapid succession and knew that even she couldn't keep up this pace.

  She had been teetering on the edge of sanity ever since he knew her, but this was shoving her over that edge. He wasn't sure exactly why, whether it was just Diana's death or the idea that she couldn't do anything about it. She'd lost so many people, you'd have thought she would have gotten used to it by now, but she obviously hadn't. She was determined to find something to keep them all alive forever.

  "Stop, at least for awhile. Get something to eat, sleep for awhile," Gerald pleaded. "Please, RJ."

  She spun in her chair, turning to look at him, her face a mask of rage. "Don't call me that! Never call me that!"

  "It's your name," Gerald said in confusion. "Can't you see that this isn't helping? This isn't helping Dax or Mickey, and it certainly isn't helping you. You can't go on like this. It's making you crazy."

  "I'm not crazy. He found the key to eternal life, and I'm going to find it. There is no way he would have destroyed the formula. It has to be here somewhere."

  "He was insane, RJ . . ."

  "Don't call me that!" she screamed.

  "It's your name!" he insisted, now every bit as mad as she was. "I can't take this anymore. Get your crazy ass up out of that chair, go get something to eat and go to bed. If the information is in this computer it's been here for hundreds of years. It can wait till in the morning."

  "Don't you tell me what to do!" she yelled back, getting to her feet and taking a menacing step forward.

  "Why the hell not? You're my woman, I love you, and I'm not going to stand here one more day and watch you go one ounce crazier while I have a breath left in my body. If you want to continue this crazy shit, you're going to have to kick my ass."

  For a second he got the impression that she was about to rip him in two, which he knew she was capable of. Then she just ran to him, threw her arms around his neck and started to cry. "Can't you see? I can't lose you, Gerald. I can't lose you, or Mickey, or Dax. I can't."

  He picked her up and kissed her forehead, then started carrying her towards their quarters. "Everything dies, and then all that matters is how well it lived," he said gently, trying to comfort her.

  "Not me, Gerald, I don't die. Everyone around me, but not me, and I'll be alone. Don't you see, Gerald? I'll be all alone."

  "No you won't. There will always be new people for you to love, to love you."

  "It's not the same. Don't you see it's not the same? You can't replace people like you do shoes. And I can't stand it; I know I can't. I'll go all the way crazy, and then I'll never get back."

  When Jessica woke up in the morning and went over what she'd been doing, and more importantly what she'd been saying, she admitted—at least to herself—that she had gone over the edge. Gerald had been right. Some food, some sleep, and a lot of sex; in short, a little normalcy had put things back in perspective.

  She rolled over and hugged Gerald, loving the feel of him. Sleeping with him was like sleeping with a huge, stuffed bear. He made her feel safe, though in reality what could happen to her? He wasn't afraid of her, and she liked that. Every other man she'd ever slept with, including Zark, had feared her. Gerald didn't. She could kill him in a heartbeat and he knew it, yet he had no fear of her. He trusted her absolutely, and so she trusted him.

  "Did you sleep?" he asked rolling in her arms to face her.

  "Yes." She kissed his lips. "Very well. Very well, indeed."

  "Do you feel better?" he asked carefully.

  She laughed. "Yes, I feel better, but no, I'm not going to quit looking for the cure to death."

  Gerald sighed. "Could you at least pretend to be sane while you're doing it?"

  "Yes." She kissed him again, then started rubbing her body against his seductively. "If you'll remind me every once in awhile."

  Mickey and Gerald sat at a table in the cafeteria, each with a cup of coffee. With Diana's death and RJ's obsessive, crazed attempts to find Topaz's formula, they hadn't had a chance to really talk in months.

  "How are you?" Gerald asked.

  "All right, as long as I don't think about her. Everyone keeps telling me that eventually I'll be able to think of her without feeling the pain," Mickey shrugged. "I try to keep busy. Dax seems to be doing well. Of course, I don't know that it's at all healthy for him to have joined RJ in her mad quest for Topaz's formula, but . . . Well, it keeps him busy, and I know being busy helps me. He's with RJ, and he does love her."

  "And she loves him." Gerald sighed. "She had plans, big plans, good plans. How to deal with the Reliance. Now . . . I've talked to her till I'm blue in the face, but she won't listen. She's hell bent on making us live forever."

  "Without even bothering to ask us if it's what we want or not," Mickey said. "She's afraid of being alone. I think it's the only thing she actually fears."

  "I know, she's told me as much. I understand, but would you . . . would you want to be immortal?" Gerald asked carefully.

  "Right now . . . no. I don't care what people say, I don't really believe that losing Diana is a pain that's ever going to go away, and I wouldn't want to live an eternity without her. What if those religious 'hoo-ha's' are right and there is some sort of life after this one, and I could go there and be with her again, be with Whitey, and Sandra, Topaz and Levits?"

  "It's a nice thought," Gerald said.

  "What about you, Gerald? Would you want to live forever?"

  "On my world we believed in a lot of strange things as you know, but the one thing that still makes sense to me is that souls get recycled. When you die, you become someone else, get to live a new life, maybe on a new world, have a new adventure. I think I'd like that, but . . . I don't want her to have to be alone. I'm afraid that if she were alone then she really would go insane."

  Mickey nodded. "You know, of course, that she's not going to find what she's looking for."

  "I don't believe it exists. How could she find what doesn't exist?"

  "It doesn't exist anymore. It did exist once. Topaz created something t
hat changed him. But see, he didn't actually know how he did it. It was a mistake. Something happened, something that he didn't count on, something outside the experiment, and he could never duplicate the serum. RJ's apparently forgotten that."

  "But . . . RJ can't forget."

  "Exactly."

  Jessica read the screen for the one-thousandth time. It had taken her six months to go over all the data on file. This was the last page of text concerning Topaz. She had looked at everything. Everything he had written or spoken into the computer, everything that had so much as a mention of his name. Everything related to him or the formula that she could milk from the data banks, crystals and old disks. There was nothing. The bastard had reported everything from his old bowling score to his bowel movements. But there was nothing. Not one single file concerning the experiment that had made him immortal.